Large Hadron Collider

After a few years of upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider in Europe is smashing particles together once again to discover more about the Universe.

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A pentaquark and two tetraquarks are the latest subatomic particles observed by the LHCb Collaboration.

And there’s plenty of useful data to be gleaned besides the new particles that come out of the collisions. One particle is a pentaquark (a hadron made up of five quarks) and the other two are tetraquarks. “The more analyses we perform, the more kinds of exotic hadrons we find,” said Niels Tuning, an LHCb physics coordinator, in a CERN release.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is back with more powerful collisions than ever before and scientists are thrilled to see what they can learn.

In some sense, [Higgs] is related to many open questions related to, for instance, the evolution of the universe [and] to even its fate." McBride said the upgraded LHC will "be able to do precision measurements to understand what the Higgs is, what it's telling us about nature." Parkes noted it took 15 years of planning to get this far, which means that finally operating the upgraded detector "is a really exciting time."

Scientists at European nuclear research center CERN discovered three never-before-seen subatomic particles while working with the Large Hadron Collider.

The drastically energized beams of protons will cause more collisions which, in theory, will allow for more new discoveries. "The more analyses we perform, the more kinds of exotic hadrons we find," physicist Niels Tuning explained in CERN's statement. Now, the new subatomic particle discoveries will help physicists better understand the way in which quarks bing to form composite particles.

CERN Large Hadron Collider: What have physicists found and what are they looking for next. [Image: R. Gonzalez Suarez/CERN].

More than 5,500 scientists from 245 institutes in over 40 countries work on the LHC’s largest experiment, ATLAS. Other new experiments at CERN probing the nature of the universe will focus on collisions of high-energy ions, to better understand the plasma that was present only in the first microsecond after the Big Bang; probe the insides of protons; study cosmic rays; and search for the still-hypothetical magnetic monopole, an isolated magnet with only one magnetic pole. The new tetraquarks, observed with a statistical significance of 6.5 and 8 standard deviations respectively, are the first time a pair of tetraquarks has been observed. The first-ever pair of tetraquarks and the new pentaquark, discovered in torrents of data gathered during previous research at the LHC, will help explain how subatomic particles form. Specifically, the new findings will help theorists develop a unified model of exotic hadrons, and better understand conventional hadrons. In particle accelerators like this, slamming protons together at high energy can produce tiny fragments of the universe not normally seen. The Higgs, named for the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who theorized it, helps give all matter its mass, and is thought to have been present at the creation of the universe, moments after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

World's largest collider, which revealed Higgs boson particle, has started a third round of experiments after upgrades.

“And we don’t yet know quite how that happened, but it’s possible that had to do with the Higgs.” Because of this, the Higgs boson particle has already helped scientists to explain several phenomena, including how atoms have mass. The collision process has been used to create what has been described as a mini-big bang, helping to shed light on the conditions in the first moments of the creation of the universe. The ring is connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which keeps the magnets at ‑271.3 degrees celsius, a temperature colder than space, according to CERN. Using extremely advanced sensors, data can be collected and studied from the collisions, which can briefly reveal the even smaller particles that make up those that collided. It was shut down in 2013 and 2018 for upgrades.

These new kinds of quarks have an apt name: strange particles.

While most known pentaquarks come with charm quarks and charm antiquarks, this was the first known pentaquark with a strange quark slotted into it. Shortly after the universe began, before what we know as matter came into being, the entire cosmos was filled with a superheated slurry of quarks and gluons, freely floating. What’s new — In the latest data, particle physicists observed particles known as B mesons (comprised of a bottom antiquark and another quark) decay. (Two up quarks and one down quark, for instance, build a proton. Most of the universe is made from up and down quarks; finding the other quarks, especially the weighty and elusive top quark, took decades. Quarks come in six kinds, or "flavors" — up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom — each with a bespoke mass and electric charge.

After a four year shut down and a series of upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been reactivated. And just one day into its third run, ...

The first kind, observed in an analysis of "decays" of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. The second kind is a doubly electrically charged tetraquark. These tiny building blocks of reality are typically found in a few different varieties — up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom — which in turn can be combined into the clusters that help form protons and neutrons.